Using the conventions of a Victorian pastiche, Vine presents as satisfying a family of monsters as you’re likely to find....
In Ruth Rendell’s 12th thriller under the Vine byline (The Blood Doctor, 2002, etc.), a Swedish nurse, in order to be near her lover in London, takes a post in Essex only to find that love is in dangerously short supply at Lydstep Old Hall.
Iron-willed widow Julia Cosway maintains that her son John doesn’t really need a nurse, only a minder to keep an eye on him, especially during the afternoon walks he craves. But both she and her old friend Dr. Selwyn Lombard, who’s been following the case for 30 years, are serenely confident that John is mad, presumably schizophrenic. Kerstin Kvist, arriving like a Charlotte Brontë heroine one autumn afternoon in the late 1960s to take John in hand, soon sees that his main problem is the steady diet of tranquilizers his mother is feeding him. Instead of confronting Mrs. Cosway, however, she finds herself slipping into the routine of the Cosway daughters. She accepts countless cups of tea from Ida, congratulates Winifred on her engagement to the local rector, becomes an unwilling confidante to Ella, keeps her own counsel about wealthy, widowed Zorah and watches both Ella and Winifred fall in love with newly arrived artist Felix Dunsford, who may be even more selfish than they are. The more Kerstin learns about the Cosways, in fact, the more sympathetic she is to John, who’s condemned to be regarded as a monstrous minotaur within the labyrinth of Lydstep’s locked library, and the more like minotaurs she finds the whole sick crew that surrounds him in breathtakingly hypocritical solicitude. The combustible family—“dysfunctional before the word was invented”—is the perfect setup for Vine’s trademark long-deferred violence.
Using the conventions of a Victorian pastiche, Vine presents as satisfying a family of monsters as you’re likely to find. It’s like watching a house of cards collapse in exquisite slow-motion.Pub Date: March 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-23760-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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